Rendo / Bondware have announced more details of Q4's P_12 release.

As usual there's a scary 'new' price, a steep 'upgrade' price.

This time, given the change of ownership, there's a nasty twist. (IMHO)      

Snag is upgrade price is ONLY from P_11. They will NOT offer upgrades from P_10 or earlier.

Also, when P_12 appears, current discounts to upgrade older versions to P_11 will cease. No more P_11 licensed.      

If you don't upgrade to P_11 ASAP, you lose the discounted upgrade path...

Playlist: "Last Train to San Fernando, Last Train to San Fernando..."

So, do the math soon...
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I'm not happy with their policy, but I reckon they're trying to pull clear of Smith Micro legacy, and the umpteen P_8, P_9 & P_10 versions on the 're-seller' market.
YMMV...

This sucks ! I understand that there are development constraints & costs, & I prefer Poser over DAZ Studio (although its animation/video features seem better), however, when one considers the price of Poser one can see why more newcomers would go for the free DAZ Studio instead. Perhaps Bondware might be doing itself a disservice by removing upgrade paths for earlier versions.

Reading between the lines of the relevant Rendo 'Official Poser' forum comments, I get the distinct impression that there's a LOT of catch-up to do, and the more Bondware dug into the steenkin' mire, the worse it got...

They've made clear that 12.1, due next Easter-ish, will address a LOT of stuff that simply could not be 'staked' in time for this 12.0...

FWIW, reached the point where a couple of probable 'Insiders', perhaps Beta-Testers, perhaps even coders, simply stopped replying usefully to my complaints about trash clearance and FBX imports. Oh, and the decade-old bug that short-fields prompt for eg an OBJ's misplaced texture files. That looks like hasn't been patched since 8-character file names....

Wow,   they're already working on 12.1?

IMHO, early on, Poser was way ahead of DAZ Studio (which obviously didn't exist until much later)... but over time DAZ learned a lot about Poser's shortcomings & about what customers wanted, so DAZ Studio improved on & surpassed Poser in many aspects (but not all).

Ownership of Poser's changed so many times (Fractal, MetaCreations, Curious Labs, e-frontier, Smith Micro, Bondware); my concern is that the BUSINESS of Poser hasn't been managed as well as the BUSINESS of DAZ Studio.

It seems to me that a significant part of Poser 12 is devoted to a more thorough 'integration' of content marketplace with the application... like DAZ Studio seems to do.

But I ask myself, "Is Poser trying to catch up to DAZ Studio? Will it sustainably compete with DAZ Studio (especially given DAZ's continued free application, continued free content, marketplace & sometimes competitive pricing)? Or will we see Poser's demise a decade from now (unless a new owner takes over its reins?)"

As for me, I'll remain learning the earlier Poser versions & will stop at 11.3... but I think that BEFORE 12 is released, I should re-download 11.3 files from Renderosity's website - just in case there were updates since the last time I downloaded them, & just in case they remove all 11.3 content to host ONLY 12's files going forward.